HISTORY OF THE

Part 6

16 IRON BUTT MagazINe | Spring 2014

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IRON BUTT RALLY

The Parking Lot in Fallonife was simpler then. In 1991 Bill Clinton was just a hick governor from a state no one had ever heard of, sharpening his lust for Big Macs,

plus-sized women, and the White House. Osama bin Laden sat in the

hot sands of Sudan, scheming to turn tall buildings into dust. And in a small offi ce in Chicago, Illinois, a computer systems engineer ground his teeth and remembered an endless night in driving rain on a motorcycle. Being the self-anointed World’s Nicest Guy, Mike Knee-bone wouldn’t appear at fi rst blush to be the sort of person who could carry a grudge for fi ve long years, but the memory of that rain-swept night on the bike on the second leg of the 1986 Iron Butt Rally had branded his soul, and not in a good way. He and four other riders had been victimized by sloppy directions to a bonus location. While they knew what they were doing, it didn’t help; other riders, unaware that the magnetic poles had reversed, stumbled across the bonus by chance and were rewarded for their blind luck. And that wasn’t even the half of it. Prize money was at stake. To Kneebone’s mind that demeaned the nature of the quest. Knights didn’t slay dragons and rescue damsels in distress for gold and silver; they did it for immortality and the chivalric code. Th e world’s toughest rally needed full-time adult supervi-sion, dedicated administrators, publicity, and attention to detail. Reputations are in the same way bankruptcy occurs: fi rst gradu-ally, then suddenly. By 1988 the bloom on Mike Rose’s rose had vanished. As for the rally’s allure, only Emily Dickenson could describe it:

It dropped so low in my regardI heard it hit the ground.

1991: Lazarus Awakens Step by step Kneebone gathered up the crumbs of a dying rally — a mailing list here, a copyrighted name there, a news-letter somewhere else — all the while struggling to keep the original concept on lifesupport and vowing one day to resur-rect, promote, and deliver a clean event to a pack of enthusiastic riders. In the summer of 1991, the table was fi nally set. Reno BMW’s Jan Cutler, who himself had labored in the vineyards by organizing local rallies following the collapse of the Iron Butt in 1988, volunteered to host the start and fi nish of the event at his dealership in Nevada. Kneebone reserved for himself the Last Say on Everything. And thus the word went forth throughout the land: Th e Butt Is Back. Twenty-seven riders quickly signed up, just six of them — Bill Pharness, Harold Brooks, Robert Gerberich, Gregg Smith, Fran Crane, and Dave McQueeney — veterans. It was the larg-est fi eld in the IBR’s brief history, almost double the turnout of 1987. Still, as was noted initially, it was a simpler time. Th e entire rule book consisted of barely 1,000 words. GPS receivers and tracking devices were the stuff of Buck Rogers’ dreams. Automap, the fi rst commercially-available computer mapping software, had just come on the market (for $79.95 plus shipping), but it wouldn’t do a rider any good unless he could carry a desk-top computer with a 20-megabyte hard drive and a monitor in his saddlebag. For the fi rst time riders would compare their odometers to a known standard over a 60-mile stretch, though measurements would laughably be taken to only the nearest whole mile. Th is useless exercise produced an odometer correc-tion factor of 1.0000 for ten riders. It was a kind of progress, however halting. By noon on the last day of August, the fi eld had assembled at the Best Western motel in Fallon, Nevada. In my capacity as the Association’s general counsel, I gave a benediction at lunch,

By Bob Higdon

Reno SparksSparks

Santa AnaSanta Ana

SpokaneSpokaneSpokane

McHenryMcHenryMcHenry

MontgomeryvilleMontgomeryville

Baldwin

Mansfield

Spring 2014 | IRON BUTT MagazINe 17

IRON BUTT RALLY

pronouncing the rally to be well and truly blessed. I continued the ritual benediction for the next several rallies until I came to believe that they were very likely doing more harm than good. Th at night I stood in the motel parking lot swilling beer with Fred Rau, the editor of Road Rider magazine. Th e riders had long been in bed, dreaming of cheap gasoline, endless tail winds, and sugarplums. “Of all the bikes in this lot,” I said, “surely mine is the most fortu-nate.” Rau asked why. “Because it doesn’t have to hump my wrinkled ass around this entire country during the next eleven days.” Fred, then possessed of a frightening body-mass index, allowed that he was exceptionally fond of steak but that he didn’t want to eat it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. We cracked open another round of Budweisers to celebrate our wisdom before heading off to com-mune with our own sugarplums. As we did, Lazarus began to stir.

The Angry Writer with 400,000 Readers “Who’s the Betty on the back of the Gold Wing?” I asked

Steve Losofsky and rookie Peter Hoo-

geveen just before the start of the 1991

IBR in Sparks.

Kneebone. Th e riders were minutes away from the rally’s start. “I didn’t know there was a two-up team.” “She’s John Burns’ girlfriend. He’s dropping her off in Wis-consin.” “John Burns the writer?” I gasped. “You think it’s a good idea to have a guy from Cycle magazine telling the world what we’re doing? You better hope he’s in a good mood.” »

18 IRON BUTT MagazINe | Spring 2014

IRON BUTT RALLY Burns wasn’t even close to that. In the weeks running up to the rally John had been fi red at Cycle magazine, State Farm had cancelled his car insurance, and the California Department of Motor Vehicles was threatening to suspend his license. Th at wasn’t the bad part. David Edwards, the editor at Cycle World, had off ered Burns a special assignment for a show-and-tell on the Iron Butt. Th is is huge, right? Th e Babe Ruth of moto scribblers is going to put our little dumpling of a rally on the world stage! Yes, except for the part about how Burns utterly despises the idea of long-distance scavenger hunts and if he’s in any kind of mood at all, it’s a mood to reduce everything he sees, hears, or senses in the next eleven days to radioactive dust.

What Child Is This? Not all rookies are created equal. Jimmy Clark, then the reigning Formula I champion, had NASCAR’s yellow bumper on his Ford when he raced at Rockingham, North Carolina in 1967. He accepted the categorization with perfect grace. In the 1991 Iron Butt the rookie label wouldn’t intimidate Peter Hoo-geveen either. He was the protégé of the legendary Canadians Roy Eastwood, Ross Copas, and Frank Kujawa. Steve Chalmers and Frank Taylor, Salt Lake City’s favorite sons, were hardcore riders. Joe Mandeville and Dave Mishalof, riding as a team from Los Angeles, were destined to rewrite the BMW MOA mile-age contest record books. Another Angeleno, Ron Major, would soon be the go-to guy for setting up a Honda ST1100 for long-distance riding. Steve Losofsky was Jan Cutler’s partner at Reno BMW. Each would say the other was the better rider, skating quickly past the fact that few motorcyclists could keep up with either of them. Rookies, yes, but riders? Oh, hell yes. Kneebone and Cutler told the riders that the fi rst couple of legs would be easy warm ups to get everyone used to the pace. Th ey said they expected a 27-way tie for fi rst at the second checkpoint. Th en, they warned, as the rally headed into the northeast corridor, the attrition would start. Sure enough, there was a 16-way tie for the lead at the fi rst checkpoint in Spokane, Washington. It didn’t take long for one of the co-leaders to fall out. Shortly after the start of leg #2, Dave McQueeney, veteran of the ’86 and ’87 rallies, drifted off the road and broke his wrist. He was assisted by fellow Californian Steve Black who, as luck would have it, was a registered nurse. Being a rookie, Black probably didn’t know it is axiomatic that such acts of selfl essness have a wonderful eff ect on the Good Samaritan’s fi nishing position. At the second checkpoint in Illinois just fi ve riders, contrary to the massive knot that Kneebone and Cutler had envisioned, were tied for fi rst: the always dangerous Fran Crane and rookies Charles Perry, Rick Shrader, Ed Sutton, and Peter Hoogeveen. Th e latter, the youngest rider in the fi eld, had overcome an awful mistake. He’d left his rally documents in a diner in Red Lodge, Montana, not realizing the error until he’d ridden more than 70 miles. Riders agonize about ways to save fi ve minutes a day; Hoogeveen had just thrown away two hours. Forty points

behind the leaders was a clump tied for sixth: Harold Brooks, Ken Hatton, Ron Major, and the Good Samaritan Steve Black. Bill Pharness, another 60 points back, had sole possession of tenth place. He was hoping to improve on his DNF in 1987.

Go East, Young Man Th e riders by now were getting a sense of Mike Kneebone’s bonus rhythms. He was using locations that featured former IBR riders ( Jim Plunkett’s tire store in Spokane), places with motorcycle themes (suppliers, museums, factories, and dealer-ships), or scenic routes (U.S. 12 in Idaho, Yellowstone National Park, and Beartooth Pass). Most of all he loved forcing riders to backtrack, knowing how much he despised backtracking him-self. One bonus on the third leg to Gorham, Maine (north-east of the Illinois checkpoint) was Times Beach, Missouri, 350 miles to the southwest. Worth a mere 24 points, it was a frivo-lous off ering — as had been unreachable bonuses in Tok, Alaska and Dallas, Texas on the fi rst two legs — but it was a portent of more diabolical things. In 1999 Kneebone would force riders on a 1,000-mile backtrack that would determine the outcome of the rally. For many riders who lived on the west side of the Mississippi

Peter Hoogeveen during the odo check with Jan Cutler.

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river, being on the east side of the Big Muddy was more than a little uncomfortable. Eastern riders had won (or tied for) every Iron Butt Rally to date. During the next 54 hours they would be in the northeast highway corridor, the belly of the beast. Th e route was relatively straightforward: hit a Harley dealer in Pennsylvania, attend a lecture in New Jersey by police offi cer Richard Frost, a rider from the ’87 IBR, on the evils of speeding, and visit an Indian motorcycle museum in Springfi eld, Mas-sachusetts. It was not a leg designed to shake up the standings, but it did. Th is is the part of the rally where it devolves from a Ride into a Grind. Th e initial excitement has fl ed, yet the end isn’t anywhere in sight. Every mile becomes a slog through mud; the body and the brain begin ingesting themselves. John Burns felt it more than the others, particularly since he’d never wanted to run away with the circus in the fi rst place. He called it “Iron Butt dementia,” though he thought he might become more competitive after he’d dropped his girlfriend off in Wisconsin. Th at didn’t happen. He would pick up a bonus or two, then arrive at the next checkpoint so late that he’d lose everything he’d gained and more. “Th e Gold Wing feels very small, a tiny boat in heavy seas,” Burns wrote for Cycle World. “It’s at this point that I begin to miss Jane. I think about my cozy house, my fi replace, my refrigerator, my cat.” He didn’t want to, but he kept going. Fran Crane’s BMW was the fi rst casualty of the third leg. It developed incurable fuel injection problems, putting her out of the rally. Both Frank Taylor and Ken Hatton had mechanical failures but, unlike Fran, were able to continue. Charles Perry had a terrible run, dropping out of a fi rst-place tie to sixth over-all. Another co-leader, Peter Hoogeveen, decided to break from the pack and try for a diffi cult bonus in Detroit. Th at was a seri-ous mistake. He bailed out, but not before he’d run out of time to make Frost’s lecture, the largest bonus on the leg. He com-pounded his errors by coming in 20 minutes late to the Maine checkpoint. He lay a disappointing fi fth overall. Rick Shrader and Ed Sutton had made no mistakes. Th ey were now the rally’s sole co-leaders. Ron Major and Steve Black were tied for third. Virginia’s Harold Brooks moved into 7th, Robert Gerberich climbed into 8th, and the team of Mandeville and Mishalof were tied for ninth. Th e fi eld headed for Mont-gomeryville Cycle, the birthplace of the Iron Butt, in the sub-urbs of Philadelphia. Th ey had 15 hours to make it. Th e riders faced a routing problem with three potential bonus stops: Bangor, Maine (61 points), Brattleboro, Vermont (64 points), and Newport, Rhode Island (38 points). You don’t have time to do all three, so which two can you grab? Bangor required a demoralizing north-east backtrack when the checkpoint lay to the southwest. It was the Times Beach bonus revived, except that now the distance wasn’t as great and the points were substantially more. Was it worth it, the 23-point gain for hitting Bangor-Brattleboro vs. Brattleboro-Newport? At times like this you can almost see the riders’ collective blood pressures rising as they wrestle with the variables: Bangor = backtrack, Newport = traffi c, and Brattleboro = deer-infested forests with small, crappy roads. And no matter what they decided, waiting for them to the south was the George Wash-ington bridge in New York City and an absolutely must-have

receipt worth 200 points. As Hoogeveen learned on the ride to Maine, a guaranteed way to go from 1st to 5th on the scoreboard is to pass up the leg’s biggest bonus. Steve Black stared at the map. He’d been a nurse in intensive care units long enough to know the fi rst rule of medical emergencies: in a crisis the fi rst blood pressure you take is your own. He took a deep breath and headed for Bangor. No one followed him. Traffi c was heavy near the checkpoint that Saturday morn-ing. Not even half of the riders had made it to the Cycle Center when penalties began accumulating at one point per minute. Of the leading group only Steve Black, Ron Major, and Charles Perry had arrived on time. Black had picked up Bangor and Brattleboro; Major and Perry had settled for Brattleboro and Newport. Co-leaders Sutton and Shrader were 19 and 26 min-utes late respectively. Worse for Sutton, he screwed up the bridge receipt. Yards shy of the checkpoint, Peter Hoogeveen was nailed for speeding by a local cop. Th at would cost him 24 minutes in penalties. When the dust settled, Steve Black’s decision to backtrack to Bangor had put him into the lead by 23 points over Ron Major. With a rough run, Rick Shrader dropped from 1st to 3rd. Hoogeveen’s leg hadn’t been much better, but he actually gained a spot in the standings. Sutton was in 5th but so exhausted that it was questionable whether he could even continue. Perry and Brooks maintained their positions at 6th and 7th. Th e Mishalof and Mandeville team climbed a spot to 8th with Robert Ger-berich’s inability to get the bridge receipt. It had been a short, brutal night, but at least the worst of the congested northeast was behind them. Th ey continued south.

Things That Go Bump in the Night Th ere weren’t many bonuses between Montgomeryville and the Baldwin, Florida checkpoint west of Jacksonville. Th e leg was designed to be a recovery section, and so it was. Th e top 15 spots remained unchanged from Montgomeryville. After an hour’s break the fi eld, still with 25 riders, turned west for the Mansfi eld, Texas checkpoint, 30 hours and about 1,360 miles distant. It too should have been an uneventful romp. Harold Brooks and Rick Shrader made sure that it wasn’t. Brooks lit out for a mom ’n pop grocery in Hot Coff ee, Mississippi. At 90 points it was the leg’s biggest reachable bonus. Harold’s dilemma, as he began to realize, was that he had no chance of getting a receipt

Th e infamous bonus in

Hot Coff ee, Mississippi

20 IRON BUTT MagazINe | Spring 2014

at the store before it closed at 7:00 p.m. Can you see where this sad tale is heading? Brooks called the store and had them leave a receipt for him under a brick by the front door. He wasn’t the fi rst scoundrel to be caught pulling this trick — Kneebone easily discovered the scheme before Harold reached the checkpoint in Texas — and he wouldn’t be the last, but perhaps because of the little town’s unique name, an attempted deception of this kind would forever be known as a violation of the Hot Coff ee rule. In Louisiana, far to the south of Harold Brooks that night, riders came upon an unholy scene. A motorcycle had run off the highway, plunging into a moccasin-infested bayou up to its headlight. Something in the form of a bearded mountain man was struggling to crawl out of the water onto dry land. Th e riders, jus-tifi ably fearful of what they beheld, approached cautiously, then realized that the apparition was none other than Rick Shrader. Th e bad part was that in two-fi fths of a second, Rick plummeted from third overall to DNF; the good part was that upon hearing the story, John Burns immediately rechristened Shrader “Swamp Th ing,” a name that belongs to the Iron Butt ages. It was the most spectacular exit in the history of the Rally. Steve Black solidifi ed his hold on fi rst place with an excellent ride from Florida to Texas. He and Robert Gerberich picked a route that looped north through Arkansas while the rest of the pack stayed south. Black now led Major by 163 points and Hoo-geveen by 288. Ed Sutton fell further behind Black but gained a spot to fourth with Swamp Th ing’s retirement. Charles Perry, who had run steadily from the start, was time-barred in Texas, diving 17 spots to 23rd, 105 points behind John Burns. Th ere were but two legs remaining, and it was becoming

increasingly clear that the ICU nurse was preparing to give his very nervous patients some medicine that they’d rather not take.

Your Choice When archeologists sift through the remains of Iron Butt records ten thousand years from now, they will conclude that this was the leg where Mike Kneebone morphed from rally-master to rallymaster. In Texas he handed the riders a bonus list that provided a stark choice: take a route that basically paral-lels Interstate 10 all the way west to the Santa Ana, Califor-nia checkpoint or loop up instead through Colorado and back down through Utah. Th e bonuses on the northern arc are worth 148 more points than those on the southern route. If you look at a road map of the continental United States, I promise you that there is no way you can conclude that

going through Colorado and Utah to Califor-nia makes an atom of sense. To Steve Black it looked like, in Burns’ words, “a much longer route.” It wasn’t; it was actually 15 miles shorter than running through Big Bend (Texas), New Mexico, and Arizona. Th is is the sort of mapping problem that is trivial with today’s equipment. In 1991 only two riders, Peter Hoogeveen and Ed Sutton, saw through Kneebone’s optical illusion and in so doing, gained signifi cant ground on the fi eld. Every other rider stayed to the south. For Sutton, who had somehow recovered from com-plete collapse at the mid-point in Montgom-eryville, it was a moral victory, but his failure to obtain a receipt at the George Washington

IRON BUTT RALLY

Only the leader can look this relaxed: Steve Black at speed in west Texas.

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Steve Black and Ron Major plot routes from Texas to California.

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Spring 2014 | IRON BUTT MagazINe 21

bridge had put him too far back to have a realistic shot at third place. Nor had it been enough for Hoogeveen to catch Black, although he was able to leapfrog over Ron Major into second place.

The Last Night When the scoring was completed in Santa Ana, California, Steve Black held a lead of 142 points over Peter Hoogeveen and 163 points over Ron Major. As the bonus packages were distrib-uted at 6:00 p.m., the riders feverishly inspected them. After a few minutes Steve Black smiled. Th is is why:

Location State PointsFresno ............................... CA .................. 25Oakland Bay Bridge ......... CA ................ 327Kramer Junction ............... CA ................100Beatty ............................... NV ..................60Tonopah ........................... NV .................. 15Ely .................................... NV .................131Austin ............................... NV ................ 190Carson City ...................... NV ................200

He did some quick calculations on the back of a napkin. Black ignored Major; languishing in third place, he was clearly out of the running. Hoogeveen, however, still had a chance, although a small one. Peter would have to ride east, picking up the bonuses in Kramer Junction, Beatty, Tonopah, Ely, Austin, and Carson City: 100 + 60 + 15 + 131 + 190 + 200 = 696. Add that to Peter’s 16,960 total at Santa Ana and, tossing in the 2,000-point checkpoint bonus, Peter’s best score, Black calcu-lated, could be no more than 19,556 (16,960 + 696 + 2,000). To pull off that trick Hoogeveen would have to make a 900-mile ride in the last 16 hours of the rally. Black, in such a case, would need only the Bay Bridge and Carson City for 527 points. Add that to his 17,102 current total and, with 2,000 points for the checkpoint bonus, he fi nishes with 19,629. He will win the 1991 Iron Butt Rally by 73 points and there’s not a thing the young Canadian can do to stop him. It’s almost icing on Steve Black’s cake that for every three miles he rides to the fi nish in Reno, Hoogeveen will have to ride four. And so the last leg of the resurrected Iron Butt Rally sym-bolically commenced, ten years to the day before the twin towers in New York collapsed, the leader heading toward the

bright lights of San Francisco for a certain win and his only remaining competition beginning a doomed trek toward Death Valley. Th ey must roll into the parking lot of Jan Cutler’s Reno BMW dealership by 10:00 the next morning. Th ere are long nights on the rally, and then there’s the last long night. John Burns, as usual, was struggling. “I ride 10 min-utes and park for an hour, ride 8 minutes and park for an hour. Nothing is harder to do than stay awake when your brain doesn’t want to, and nothing is more dangerous on a motorcycle.” Th ree hours before dawn on that night Harold Brooks went off the road south of Mina, Nevada, 180 miles from the fi nish, wreck-ing his bike, his collar bone, and what would have been a certain fi fth place fi nish. Steve Black was the fi rst serious contender to arrive in Reno. Apart from missing a 40-point gas receipt on leg #2 and taking the southern route to Santa Ana on leg #7, his had been a fl aw-less ride. It was not until he reached the scoring table that he saw what he would remember for the rest of his life as Th e Problem: he’d made a mistake in addition when he was calcu-lating Peter Hoogeveen’s best possible score. Th e total wasn’t 19,556 as Black had originally believed; it was 19,656, 27 points better than Steve’s 19,629. For a moment the nurse thought he might need a nurse. He tried to collect his thoughts. Maybe Hoogeveen would be late, as he’d been at the checkpoints in Maine, Pennsylvania, and Texas. Th ere was still hope, however faint. Moments later Ron Major rolled his Gold Wing into Cutler’s parking lot. Black stared at him. Had he too gone to Ely? Major had indeed. Th e 696 bonus points he’d picked up along the way were 169 more than Black had collected. In a staggering turn-around Major had managed to wipe out his defi cit of 163 points and now became the leader of the ’91 Iron Butt Rally by six points. Still, it wasn’t over. Peter Hoogeveen, the last rider with a chance for the win, was nowhere in sight. At 10:00 a.m. the penalty clock began subtracting one point per minute from Hoogeveen’s score. With a 21-point lead over Major at the end of leg #7, Peter needed to be at the fi nish before 10:21 a.m. to win the rally. He arrived at 10:25.

Around the Campfire the Legends Grow Th is is how folklore begins. Knights on white chargers go forth, battle dragons, and return bloodied but unbowed. For Steve Black the end had come in a low-rent way. He had taken everything that Mike Kneebone and Jan Cutler could throw at him and brushed it all aside. No rider had plotted better routes, as his top scores on fi ve of the eight legs attested. No highway, bonus, penalty, or dragon had stopped him. He had aided fellow knights in distress on two occasions. His Achilles heel was nothing more than a careless error of arithmetic. But for that he would have headed north to Kramer Junction and Austin and taken fi rst place with ease. But for… In Peter Hoogeveen’s case the most formidable dragon he’d faced during the lengthy quest was himself. His adventures had been an almost comical litany of pain: the forgotten papers in Deer Lodge, the missed big bonus in New Jersey, the traffi c stop in Montgomeryville within sight of the checkpoint, and the late arrivals on three other legs. Remove fi ve minutes from one — just one — of those unforced errors and he returns to Ontario in triumph. But for… »

towers in New York collapsed, the leader heading toward the

Steve Black’s route Peter Hoogeveen’s route

22 IRON BUTT MagazINe | Spring 2014

Th e last man then standing was the knight errant engineer from Los Angeles, Ron Major. He’d done nothing particularly spectacular during the eleven days but, more importantly, he’d done nothing to blow himself out of the water either. Peter could outride him and Steve could devise better routes, but if you were teaching your brother how to deal with this event, you’d tell him simply: Ride like that guy, Ron Major. Don’t get any tickets, don’t be late, and don’t piss in the soup. Above all, take Napoleon’s advice: “Never interfere with your enemy when he is making a mistake.” And so it came to pass that of all the wonders and deeds of daring that transpired during the 1991 Iron Butt Rally, one tale was destined to outshine all the others, that being the myth of the six-pack of beer. Around the fi re in countries far and wide

Rank NameState/Prov. Bike Miles Points

1 Ron Major CA Honda Gold Wing 10858 19635

2 Peter Hoogaveen ONT BMW K75 11142 19631

3 Steve Black CA Honda Gold Wing 10515 19629

4 Ed Sutton TX Honda Gold Wing 10646 19400

5 Robert Gerberich OH BMW K100RT 9728 18651

6 Bill Pharness ID Honda ST1100 9783 18564

7 Dave Mishalof CA BMW K100RS 9148 18384

7 Joe Mandeville CA BMW K100RS 9149 18384

9 Steve Chalmers UT Yamaha Venture 9146 17764

10 Ed Otto IL BMW K100LT 9232 17717

11 Steve Losofsky NV BMW K100RT 9442 17536

12 Gregg Smith RI Yamaha Venture 8776 17403

13 Larry Ribbeck CA Honda ST1100 8517 16861

IRON BUTT RALLYand in languages strange and fearful they tell of how Peter Hoogeveen stopped for fi ve minutes on the way to the fi nish of the IBR in 1991 to buy some beer, that he accrued fi ve points in penalties for his lateness, and that he lost the rally by four points. Th ey tell of how for the next 20 years Mike Kneebone would require riders to bring a cold six-pack of beer to the scoring table at the fi nish as the rally’s fi nal bonus, and they tell of how Kneebone would hold the beer in his hand to ensure that it was indeed cold. Th ey tell of how the riders and staff would laugh and jeer at Hoogeveen’s ancient sin and warn the rookies of the dangers of beer and wasted time and ruined lives. It never happened. At least it didn’t happen like that. Peter had stopped in Beatty for the bonus and gas late on Wednesday night. Some loose cans of beer lay on ice next

to the check-out register. He picked up a couple and paid for the gas, tossed the cans in a saddlebag, and forgot about them until the next day. From that acorn grew the mighty, apocryphal oak. Curiously, though the myth haunted him for the remainder of his long, illustrious riding career, Hoogeveen never denied the story. Maybe he sensed that his heartbreaking loss on the ’91 Butt could serve a higher purpose. Maybe he hoped another rider could be taught to stay constantly focused, even if the legend had nothing to do with Hoogeveen’s own unwavering concentration. Myths like the six-pack and heroes like Peter, Steve, and Ron are the core and common glue of all social groups. If the 1991 Iron Butt Rally gave us nothing else, it surely gave us that.

On the Podium (L-R): Peter Hoogeveen, Ron Major, and Steve Black.

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14 James Sisk WA Honda V65 Sabre 9068 16640

14 Eric Gibson WA Suzuki GSXR1100 8986 16640

16 Burt Smith HI Honda ST1100 8822 16556

17 Charles Perry CA Kawasaki Concours 10782 16490

18 Clyde MacIver WA H-D FXRS 9049 16357

19 James Stewart WI Yamaha V-Max 8034 16272

20 Garve Nelson CA Honda VT1100 8180 16191

21 John Burns CA Honda Gold Wing 8717 16079

22 Frank Taylor UT Yamaha Venture 9355 15225

23 Ken Hatton IL Honda Gold Wing 8996 13084

DNF Harold Brooks VA Honda Gold Wing 9781 16403

DNF Rick Shrader OR BMW R65 6871 12181

DNF Fran Crane CA BMW K100RS 3595 5154

DNF Dave McQueeney CA BMW R100GS 1021 2461